Letter No. 14: The Grief I Didn't Have

The day a doctor told me my life might be cut short

Dear Friend,

I want to tell you about a grief I never had. I didn't manage it with willpower, and I wasn't being brave. What kept that grief from moving in was the calm, settled comfort of knowing exactly Who was in the room with me, and exactly where I was going if I didn't survive.

A few years back, I received an unthinkable diagnosis. A renowned neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic sat across from me and described something growing inside my skull that, in his own words, he had never seen documented in quite that way before. Two brain surgeries and a stroke later, I’m still here, greeting you from this page—so you already know how the chapter ended. But I want to be honest about the middle of it, because that’s where the real question lives: what do you do with news like that—the dread diagnosis?

Here’s what surprised several people around me. I never grieved the prospective loss of my own life—not the way I’ve watched good people grieve such a serious diagnosis, with the sleepless 3 a.m. spirals, the bargaining, the dread that seeps into grocery runs and bedtime prayers and every quiet dinner at the table.

Not that I felt no fear. I did, just not the fear you’d probably expect. I wasn’t afraid of the anesthesia, or the scalpel, or even of dying on the table. My fear was narrower and heavier: that I’d survive the surgery and wake up changed on the inside—that the nerve damage to my brain might change my personality and I might no longer love my wife and children the way I always wanted to. That fear was genuine, and it was mine. Most people facing news like that are afraid, plainly and understandably, of dying itself, and I get that. Mine simply took a different shape.

Underneath the fear, though, there was no grief over losing my life, and I believe that’s because losing it isn’t really a loss. Not when you know, all the way down, that what waits past that threshold isn’t an ending but a far better life.

That difference has a name, and the Apostle Paul gave it to us two thousand years ago, writing to a grieving church in Thessalonica: “We do not want you to be uninformed... about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Paul was talking about grieving a loved one’s death, and that grief belongs there every time. Losing someone is still a loss; I’m not telling you to skip the tears at a graveside. I’d be concerned about you if you did. But that same verse quietly answers a second type of grief nobody preaches on: the grief of learning your own life may be shorter than you expected.

That second grief is real, and it isn’t shameful. Anyone who tells you a frightening diagnosis should simply bounce off a person of faith has never received one. But hard news and hopeless grief are two different animals, and what separates them is whether you trust Who is waiting on the other side of this brief life.

So let me show you the thing that keeps my own life the right size in my head.

Scripture’s own genealogies—Genesis 5, Genesis 11, and Luke 3—run ten generations from Adam to Noah and some sixty-six more from Noah to Jesus. Carry that rhythm forward another two thousand years—to our era—and you land somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred generations, give or take, depending on how you count. Not a hundred thousand. Not a hundred million. A number of people you could sit down and list by name—all the generations from Adam’s to yours.

Now set your own life inside that. Call it seventy-five years, reasonable by Moses' math—"the years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty" (Psalm 90:10). Give every year of human history a page of its own and you'd be holding a book six thousand pages long, three or four family Bibles thick, stacked spine to spine on the shelf. Your entire life is contained in one brief chapter of that book, somewhere in the middle of the last section. And that entire book is a mere pamphlet next to what comes after.

Here’s where the arithmetic quits on us, because eternity is bigger than the equipment we were issued, and no illustration really captures it. The best any of them can do is leave you a little less lost than you were.

My favorite comes from the historian Hendrik Willem van Loon. He describes a mountain in a northern land called Svithjod, one hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. For scale, Mount Everest stands about five and a half miles above sea level, so we are talking about eighteen Everests stacked one on another. Once every thousand years, a little bird lands on that mountain and sharpens its beak against the stone, wearing away the smallest imaginable bit of stone. When the whole mountain has finally been worn down to nothing, one beak-sharpening per millennium, a single day of eternity will have passed. One day. Not eternity—just its first day.

Sit with that a moment. Every generation since Adam, every kingdom that rose and fell, every war, every wedding, every walk to the mailbox any of us has ever taken—the whole six-thousand-year run of it—wouldn’t register as one coffee break against forever. And I’m supposed to lose sleep over the timing of my seventy-five years?

But I want to be careful here, because bigness on its own is no comfort. If all I had were the mountain and the bird, I'd be left holding nothing but my own smallness, and smallness is scant company at three in the morning. What turned that arithmetic into comfort instead of a crushing weight is that the eternity on the far side of it is not empty. There is a Person in it. Jesus Christ walked into death ahead of me, came out the other side on the third day, and said, "Because I live, you also will live" (John 14:19). That is the whole reason the numbers read as good news. He has already made the trip. He knows the road. He has promised to come back for His own.

None of this erases your fear, or mine, but it’s the reason our fear doesn’t have to harden into grief. James wrote it more simply than I ever could: “What is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away” (James 4:14, NKJV). A vapor—you’ve seen your own breath on a chilly morning, there, visible, gone. That’s the honest length of a human life against Svithjod's mountain, against eternity itself. And Paul, writing from a prison cell, turned that same brevity into comfort: “This light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17). A life this brief was measured out short on purpose, so that what follows it could be measured in mountains, and birds, and eternity’s first, unfinished day.

That’s what sat with me in that clinic room, and it’s what let a genuinely dangerous diagnosis pass through me without leaving grief behind—not because I’m braver than you, but because I’d already been shown Who was waiting at the end of the vapor, and I trusted the report. “You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You” (Isaiah 26:3, NKJV) turned out to be literally true in my chest at three in the morning, more nights than I could count.

If you’re holding a diagnosis today, or grieving someone who has already gone on ahead of you, I’m not asking you to stop feeling what you feel. But there is a second layer underneath the fear, wide and calm, and its name is hope. It doesn’t erase the hard news. It only makes sure the hard news never gets the last word. Christ is enough for the diagnosis, enough for the operating room, and enough for whatever waits at the end of the vapor—and He will still be enough on the morning the little bird’s first day of eternity finally dawns.

Let it hold you there tonight, just as it continues to hold me.

Grace & Peace,
Pastor Neal Letteney <><
The Pastor’s Hearth

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